I have been terrible at meeting my goal and it is just generally because of life. No excuses.

I did make quite a bit of headway with editing and was just going to send the 50-70 pages I have or so to the friends who asked/offered to read it when class hit last night.

For some reason I was terribly nervous about class. While editing I had begun to notice all sorts of style issues that stem from the fact that I wrote it nearly 15 years ago… and I know a lot more now than I did then. I’ve changed a lot as a writer. So I was nervous about what would be said. I was nervous about how my teacher would act in class and would he give me a fair critique….

It went well… the critique that I expected was there. There were a lot of redundancies and some pronoun issues that were called out, rightfully so. A few things were called to my attention that were very helpful. But overall it was really liked. One gentleman said that he found it humorous and could relate to the characters. Another man said he was sure he’d dated Sadira or a co-worker several times. They pointed out several lines that they liked or places they found fascinating. One of the best things I learned was that I have a wider market than I thought. I originally thought I was writing for females 18-35 mostly. But everyone in the class said they would pick up this novel and read it…. that puts my market much wider and includes men. That was exciting.

My teacher said this was very marketable… I believe his quite was “you really have something here”….

And as far as my teacher hating me… he seemed fine last night. Laughed at some of my jokes and was generally normal like he was the first night of class. One of the men called him out on the fact that he wrote a whole new short story and we (myself and the other woman) went ahead with our novel. Teacher said that he just wasn’t clear… but she explained that we had decided to go with our novel anyway. This time the assignment is to send in 5 pages of whatever we want… anything at all. I’m not sure now what I want to send in… the next five pages of my story move things along but may not be really reflective of what I want to show next. If I can edit up to some other more challenging parts of the story that might be best.

That is the good news!

The bad news is that with the errors I found and the errors pointed out to me I now realize I really need to go back and practically rewrite everything I have. It’s full of the same sort of old writing… and would not fit with the rest of the book if I continued writing.

I hate rewriting… so this fills me with dread. Not excited about this at all… although I am eager to start. Yes I’m contradictory and weird.

So there you go! I’m excited and bummed out all at the same time!
Those who wanted pages… I’m not sure. Maybe I can send you the crappy copy if you want… but it might be best to wait for the new improved pages 😉